tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post7737313712261382646..comments2024-03-28T08:57:53.180+00:00Comments on Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart: Do "Just Babies" Confirm Adam Smith's Reflective Liberal Sentimentalism?Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-6083283721019408532019-09-28T19:54:43.619+01:002019-09-28T19:54:43.619+01:00I was just reading about the dousing of Wilson tha...I was just reading about the dousing of Wilson that you mentioned, Roger. It was in The Human Instinct by Kenneth Miller.<br /><br />Isn't Marxism a materialist philosophy? How can it not be deterministic?Jonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07465013255057574351noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-91553492715157876012019-09-28T16:38:09.452+01:002019-09-28T16:38:09.452+01:00I was just reading about the dousing of Wilson tha...I was just reading about the dousing of Wilson that you mentioned, Roger. It was in The Human Instinct by Kenneth Miller.<br /><br />Isn't Marxism a materialist philosophy? How can it not be deterministic?Jonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07465013255057574351noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-43744081365185298382019-09-22T12:51:48.697+01:002019-09-22T12:51:48.697+01:00The first Amazon review of Just Babies is by Herb ...The first Amazon review of Just Babies is by Herb Gintis. In the early 1970s, Gintis was a tenure track economics professor at Harvard. He and Sam Bowles and a number of other people were part of a group trying to revive Marxism, but in a more realistic and humanistic way. Meanwhile, Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin and some others in the biology departments were trying to do the same thing for their disciplines. One of the latter group’s major campaigns was in favor of blank slate-ism and against the idea of inherent ideas/desires. It was, they said, biological determinism, and just a step away from fascism. One result was the famous dousing of E.O. Wilson with a pitcher of water at the 1978 AAAS meetings by a Marxist group.<br /><br />Gintis and Bowles were both denied tenure in 1974. Among other places, Gintis is now affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute. Though I think he still considers himself “on the left”, he thinks Gould and Lewontin are very wrong. His five star review of Just Babies ends:<br /><br />“When I began studying social theory, the accepted wisdom was that we are born purely selfish, with morality being a convenient social veneer that hides are fundamentally sociopathic selves. The only reason people act morally, I learned, is because they are afraid of getting caught acting immorally. Moreover, I learned that every society has is own moral rules, and such rules have no communality across societies. The bulk of research in the past twenty years has shown that both of these notions are incorrect. There is a such thing as human morality, this morality has a common substrate across all societies, and we (sociopaths and other wrong-doers excepted) are predisposed by our nature as human beings to express and affirm these moral principles. Indeed, as Samuel Bowles and I show in our book A Cooperative Species (Princeton 2011), and Edward O. Wilson shows in his The Social Conquest of Earth (Norton, 2012), our success as a species depends integrally on our moral constitution. There is no better place to start in appreciating the psychological side of human morality than Paul Bloom's fine book.”Roger Sweenyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12734128265493099062noreply@blogger.com